The printer model is a key component of a color management package. High speed printer models generally determine output Lab values by using multi-dimensional lookup tables (LUTs) with interpolation between values stored in the table. However, a six color printer model with a reasonable number of colorant levels (e.g., thirteen) requires 136 values, or almost 5,000,000 entries. Many of the entries would not contain data of interest. For example, six color printers often use cyan and orange. But these two colorants tend to produce a slightly cyanish gray color which can be obtained by other means. One can attempt to solve this problem by only using printer models for subsets of input color dimensions corresponding to the colorant formulations used most often. In such an architecture, transitioning between formulations for different sub-printer-models, such as when printing a range of colors that span from a OMYK printer model to a CMYK printer model, additional color mixtures beyond the four colors of these sub-printer models can be encountered. Previous methods have encountered discontinuities when handling such transitions. Further, discontinuities may be encountered when transitioning from one of the four colorant sub-combinations to another.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art are increasingly sophisticated systems and methods for determining lookup table-based color model transfer functions that accept more than four color inputs.